He suggested I lie to my parents and say I was at a girlfriend's house, so we could 'spend the whole night together'. Liam asked me to arrange to stay out the night of the concert. I had been seeing one of them, Liam, for three weeks and had met Phil and Simon once or twice. That night, I watched them on the stage high above me and when they smiled at me, pointed me out and waved, I felt grown-up and glamorous, and important. They were a gang with catchphrases I didn't understand, mostly referring to sex acts, and little hand signals that my best friend and I emulated and giggled over in the playground at lunchtime. Their faces pouted out of photo- graphs in the local paper.
They talked about a world I knew nothing of, a glamorous world of recording studios and record contracts. The men, who were about six years older than me, were in a pop band, playing village halls and occasional support slots to bigger bands. But to me, a 14-year-old girl, only 4ft 11in tall, with very limited experience of the world, they were glamour personified. The men who raped me weren't celebrities and they weren't even rich. By the end of the night I had been gang raped in circumstances similar to those alleged by the 17-year-old girl accusing several men, including Premiership footballers, of raping her at the Grosvenor House hotel. In October 1985, I attended a pop concert against my parents' wishes.
